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Faculty Honors and Recognition
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Honors and Distinguished Appointments

Recent faculty awards and recognition

photo of Ina Petkova working on knot theory in her office, writing on a blackboard

Professor Petkova’s NSF CAREER award featured in Dartmouth News

October 25, 2022

Congratulations to Professor Ina Petkova, one of six Dartmouth recipients of the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) awards in 2022, as recently featured in Dartmouth News. “The CAREER grant is the NSF’s most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty. These awards are very difficult to obtain, particularly in pure mathematics,” says department chair Sergi Elizalde. Petkova studies the mathematics of knots, and with funding support from the CAREER grant, she will advance what are called cut-and-paste techniques of studying knots and links. As Principal Investigator, Petkova intends to further develop an invariant from bordered Floer homology for contact 3-manifolds with convex boundary, and use this invariant to address open questions in contact topology, an area with applications in physics, including classical mechanics, thermodynamics, and control theory. She also plans to extend bordered Floer homology and tangle Floer homology to integral coefficients and understand and develop the connections between knot Floer homology and quantum algebra. Photo by Katie Lenhart

photo of Ina Petkova

Congratulations to Ina Petkova on her promotion!

July 03, 2022

Please join us in congratulating Ina Petkova, who has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure! Professor Petkova works in low-dimensional topology, with focus on Heegaard Floer homology and its various generalizations. Earlier this year she received the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award, described as its “most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their organizations.” Her five-year grant will provide funding for her project, Bordered Floer homology and applications, as well as for mentoring and outreach. This summer Professor Petkova is co-leading Dartmouth SHUR 2022, partially funded by the NSF, which has invited Dartmouth undergraduates to participate in research exploring computational approaches to Legendrian Knots.

photo of Craig Sutton

Professor Sutton receives Dartmouth Social Justice Award

April 22, 2022

Congratulations to Professor Craig Sutton, one of five 2022 Social Justice Award recipients recognized for “outstanding contributions to social justice, peace, civil rights, education, public health, and environmental justice.” The recipients will be presented with their awards on May 23 in a ceremony featuring a speech by Martin Luther King III, whose father delivered a lecture at Dartmouth Hall 60 years earlier. Professor Sutton is director of the E.E. Just Program, which aims to increase the number of students from underrepresented groups who choose to pursue degrees and careers in STEM disciplines. Since 2015, he has also been house professor of School House, one of six house communities designed to increase intellectual and civic engagement as well as cross-cultural exchange. His research interests in differential geometry include Riemannian geometry, spectral geometry, and homogeneous spaces. Please join us in congratulating Professor Sutton on receiving this award! Read more in Dartmouth News.

photo of Ina Petkova

Professor Petkova wins prestigious NSF CAREER Award

February 01, 2022

Professor Ina Petkova is a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award, described as its “most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their organizations.” The grant will provide funding over the next five years for her project, Bordered Floer homology and applications, and for mentoring and outreach. As Principal Investigator, Professor Petkova will seek to develop and apply cut-and-paste mathematical tools in low-dimensional topology. She intends to further develop an invariant from bordered Floer homology for contact 3-manifolds with convex boundary, and use this invariant to address open questions in contact topology, an area with applications in physics, including classical mechanics, thermodynamics, and control theory. She also plans to extend bordered Floer homology and tangle Floer homology to integral coefficients and understand and develop the connections between knot Floer homology and quantum algebra.

photo of Feng Fu

Professor Fu receives Dean of the Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentoring and Advising

October 21, 2021

Professor Feng Fu is among thirteen members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences who have been recognized for exceptional achievement in scholarship, teaching, and mentoring for 2021. We congratulate Professor Fu on his many successes, as well as those of his students and mentees! “I am very fortunate to have the opportunity of working with our group of talented students at all levels,” says Professor Fu. “I am particularly passionate about working with both undergraduate and graduate students, and always do my best to help them to succeed in their later careers (academia and industry) after training in my lab.” The Fu Lab invites creative and self-motivated scientists (postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates) to join the research group.

composite photo of Asher Auel and Feng Fu

Congratulations to Asher Auel and Feng Fu

June 15, 2021

Please join us in congratulating Asher Auel and Feng Fu, who have received tenure and promotions to the rank of Associate Professor! Professor Auel’s research interests are in algebraic geometry and number theory; he was among the 2020 awardees of the Simons Foundation Collaboration Grants for Mathematicians. His five-year grant will explore a project on the geometry of splitting fields and rationality. Professor Fu’s research integrates applied mathematics, social science, computer science, evolutionary biology, and statistical physics. He favors a multidisciplinary approach to research and teaching in what he calls “mathematical humanities”, ranging from quantitative explorations into human behavior, the ethics of algorithms, and mathematical models of morality.

photo of Anne Gelb

SIAM News article honors Professor Gelb

April 09, 2021

A recent SIAM News article highlights the career of Anne Gelb, the John G. Kemeny Parents Professor of Mathematics, mentioning her leadership in the mathematical sciences and her many contributions to SIAM. Professor Gelb’s research involves developing highly accurate and efficient data-driven numerical methods for extracting important information in applications such as medical imaging, synthetic aperture radar imaging, climatology, signal processing, and fluid dynamics. She is currently a PI of the project Sea Ice Modeling and Data Assimilation (SIMDA), a new MURI project sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), and has co-directed Dartmouth Mathematics REU programs during the summers of 2017, 2018, and 2020.

Professor Auel awarded Simons Foundation Collaboration Grant

February 13, 2021

Professor Asher Auel is among the 2020 awardees of the Simons Foundation Collaboration Grants for Mathematicians. His five-year grant will explore the project titled Geometry of splitting fields and rationality. Professor Auel, whose research is in algebraic geometry and number theory, had presented work at the 2016 Simons Symposium Geometry Over Nonclosed Fields. A meeting with a fellow presenter at the symposium ultimately led to the 2019 joint paper Conic bundle fourfolds with nontrivial unramified Brauer group, published in Journal of Algebraic Geometry.

Professor Voight receives A&S faculty award honoring teaching and scholarship

February 03, 2021

Congratulations to Professor John Voight, one of fourteen members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences recognized for exceptional achievement in scholarship, teaching, and mentoring for 2020. Professor Voight, who received a John M. Manley Huntington Award for Newly Promoted Faculty, remarks, “Even at the frontier of discovery with my students and postdocs, we still learn from each other. One of my goals as an educator is to counter the reputation of mathematics as being a difficult subject. I try to make it intuitive, attainable, and inviting — whether in the classroom, on the page, or over breakfast.”

Applied math research team wins DoD MURI award

October 22, 2020

Professors Anne Gelb and Yoonsang Lee, along with adjunct professors Matthew Parno (Mathematics) and Chris Polashenski (Thayer School) of Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) are part of a team that has received a 2020 multidisciplinary university research initiative (MURI) award from the Office of Naval Research. As the principal investigator of their project Sea Ice Modeling and Data Assimilation (SIMDA), Professor Gelb is one of six women lead researchers among this year’s 26 awards. Dartmouth is represented on two of teams that received these high-profile awards for 2020. Please join us in congratulating Professor Gelb’s team on receiving this highly competitive award!

Dartmouth recognizes Carolyn Gordon’s retirement

August 21, 2020

Throughout her long and distinguished career at Dartmouth, Professor Carolyn Gordon has been an outstanding mentor and instructor for students at all levels. She served as adviser to half a dozen PhD students and several postdoctoral fellows, each of whom went on to successful careers. A leader in promoting and supporting women in mathematics, she served as president of the Association for Women in Mathematics and subsequently established an AWM chapter at Dartmouth. As a scholar, she is best known for her groundbreaking work with fellow mathematicians David Webb and Scott Wolpert on the mathematical question “Can One Hear the Shape of a Drum?” Learn more +

Congratulations to Professor John Voight

July 09, 2020

Please join us in congratulating John Voight, who has been promoted to the rank of Professor! Professor Voight’s research interests are in number theory and arithmetic geometry, with a focus on algorithmic aspects. His recent work has included research concerning rational points on elliptic curves and the spaces that parametrize them. He has twice been awarded the Selfridge Prize, and has written a graduate textbook on quaternion algebras. He is one of six Principal Investigators on the Simons Foundation Collaboration on Arithmetic Geometry, Number Theory and Computation, which seeks to accelerate research in these fields through the computational realization of deep theory and to use algorithmic methods to probe our conceptual understanding of complex arithmetic objects.

Professor Orellana elected to AMS Council

December 13, 2019

Professor Rosa Orellana has been elected to the Council of the American Mathematical Society as Member at Large. Professor Orellana’s research is in algebraic combinatorics with a focus on combinatorial representation theory and symmetric functions. At Dartmouth she co-founded a chapter of the AWM in an effort to increase the number of women taking and majoring in mathematics at Dartmouth and has organized Sonia Kovalevsky Math Days to encourage young women in our community to study mathematics.

Professor Winkler named Puzzle Master at MoMath

September 09, 2019

The National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath) has selected Professor Peter Winkler as the second Distinguished Chair for the Public Dissemination of Mathematics. He will launch “A Year of Puzzles” at MoMath and will lead a series of public initiatives, including mini-courses in puzzle solving, special events at city high schools, and a series of puzzle-themed dinners on probability and decision theory. “Being good at math is great, but not necessary. Being unafraid of math, and a bit curious, is enough to give any child or adult a big advantage.” Learn more +

Professor Wallace awarded for work with alumni

July 07, 2019

The Dartmouth Alumni Council presented the 2019 Rassias Award to Professor Dorothy Wallace. The award is granted to a faculty member each year and recognizes exceptional educational outreach to alumni. Professor Wallace, who has recently led alumni trips to Iceland and Greece, incorporates mathematical concepts into the excursions, making math accessible to alumni and their families.

Professor Elizalde receives Outstanding Mentoring and Advising award

September 20, 2018

Professor Sergi Elizalde has received the Dean of the Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentoring and Advising. “I enjoy mentoring research, both at the undergraduate and graduate level, and I love teaching smart and motivated Dartmouth students who are eager to learn,” says Professor Elizalde, whose main field of research is enumerative combinatorics.
Learn more +

Professor Pauls is the new director of DCAL

September 10, 2018

Mathematics Professor Scott Pauls will be the new director of the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL), announced Interim Provost David Kotz. 'Scott is ideally suited to carry on the important and innovative work that flourished at DCAL thanks to Lisa Baldez and the center’s talented staff,' says Kotz.

Graduate students and professor receive Selfridge Prize in Number Theory

July 30, 2018

The Number Theory Foundation’s 2018 Selfridge Prize in Number Theory has been awarded to Michael Musty, Sam Schiavone, Jeroen Sijsling, and John Voight for their paper A Database of Belyi Maps. The prize is awarded to the best paper submitted to the Algorithmic Number Theory Symposium (ANTS) conference proceedings.

AWM recognizes Professor Carolyn Gordon

November 22, 2017

Professor Carolyn Gordon is a member of the inaugural class of the Association for Women in Mathematics Fellows Program. This program recognizes Professor Gordon and other mathematicians for their “unwavering commitment to promoting and supporting women in mathematics”, honoring their sustained work in support of the AWM mission.

Professor Rockmore named Associate Dean for the Sciences

August 17, 2017

Prof. Dan Rockmore has been named associate dean of the sciences in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “It’s important for scientists and mathematicians to talk to each other on college campuses,” says Rockmore, “but we should not let that conversation become too hermetic. Our ideas need to be out in the world.”

Professor Wallace receives Dean of the Faculty Mentoring Award

July 19, 2017

Professor Dorothy Wallace has received the Dean of the Faculty Mentoring Award for 2016-17. Professor Wallace has previously earned an award for Graduate Faculty Mentoring.

In prior years